Toasting bubbly

Nothing says New Year’s like a bottle of sparkling wine

Bubbly!

Photograph by: David Moir/REUTERS, file
, edmontonjournal.com

New Year’s Eve is a lot of things to a lot of people, but it’s perhaps best known as a night of late-night partying, of toasts, and of the light-hearted quaffing of flutes full of bubbly.

Of course, if it’s your turn to buy the aforementioned bubbly, things can get pretty tense pretty quick when you’re faced with a wall of Champagnes and sparking wines.

Even a smallish wine shop will possess an intimidating selection, all of which are labelled in a most obscure fashion. What does “brut” mean? What is the difference between vintage and non-vintage Champagnes? And, even more fundamentally, what is the difference between sparkling wine and Champagne? (All questions answered in this story’s sidebar, by the way.)

It’s an understandable anxiety, but it’s also very easily dispelled, says Annabelle Evaristo, a partner in downtown Edmonton’s DeVine Wines and Spirits shop.

Not only is it not all that hard to wrap your head around the Champagne and sparkling-wine offerings available to you, the final choice need not break the bank. (For example, many excellent sparkling wines are nearly or as good as their French counterparts, yet they go for a fraction of the cost). More so, Champagne is much more than just a toasting beverage.

“A lot of people are shocked to discover how versatile a drink it is,” says Evaristo.

“I could happily live with only a cellar full of Champagne,” she says, underlining the fact that bubbly is a perfect companion for a wide variety of foods, from lobster to chicken to salted snacks to sushi to game birds to sugar-bomb desserts.

Given that you can serve Champagne or sparkling wine with so many foods, and that the lower-end bubbly is as cheap as mid-range still (non-carbonated) wine, it’s easy to experiment throughout the year by simply serving up sparkling alternatives instead of white wine or other drink options.

Even exploring the French Champagne world isn’t all that scary or wildly expensive.

Unlike other French wines, Champagnes are a blend of wines/grapes from all across the Champagne region (it’s estimated that one bottle may contain juice culled from grapes picked in 30 or 40 villages). Blending bubbly is a high art in the region, leading to an enviable consistency in the finished product.

According to Evaristo, this blending tradition means that the quality gap between lower-ranked non-vintage Champagnes (i.e., Champagne that doesn’t have a specific year on the label, meaning they are mixes of Champagnes fermented in different years) and the more expensive and rarer vintage Champagnes (i.e., Champagne produced in only the one year) is lower than the gap you see between the low-end and high-end of traditional still wine estates.

This quirky reality in Champagne production, says Evaristo, means that delightful non-vintage French Champagnes top out at a very consistent $65 to $70 per bottle. This seems expensive when compared to run-of-the-mill bottles of wine, but is quite affordable when compared to the “sky’s the limit” vintage bottles of Champagne.

Many champagne makers themselves say they are most proud of their non-vintage wines and the deluxe skill needed to produce a consistent — and profoundly complex — “house style.” In fact, by French law, 20 per cent of wine produced in vintage Champagne years must be set aside and blended into non-vintage years.

(It should be noted that Champagne vintage years aren’t annual occurrences like wine produced in still wineries. Vintages only occur every four or five years when it is judged that there are enough quality grapes to create a proper mono-year run. Typically, vintage Champagne is aged several years longer than its non-vintage peers.)

Even opening the bottle isn’t as hard as it seems.

The secret, says Evaristo, is not to twist the mushroom-shaped cork, but to hold the bottle at 50 degrees (being careful not to point the cork at anything breakable … or at your guests) and twist the bottle gently in a counter-clockwise direction.

Unlike what you see in the movies, no booze should spurt from the bottle, and it should make more of a sigh than a pop.

“The more noise you make opening the bottle, the more bubbles you are losing,” she says.

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